This month The New Criterion commences its fifteenth year of publication. This is in itself something of a feat for a monthly review of art and culture that is avowedly conservative in its political views and unabashedly modernist in its outlook on the arts. For ours has necessarily been a voice of embattled dissent in a period that has seen American cultural life held hostage to the imperatives of a Left-liberal ideology in politics and an ugly “postmodernist” assault on the arts. To dissent from the baleful influence of the cultural Left on the life of art and culture in our society has indeed been one of the primary purposes of The New Criterion from the outset, and it remains one of our primary functions today, when that influence continues to prosper in the academy, in the media, and in so many of the other institutions that shape our values and determine our standards.

It has not been our on ...

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